Steve Garvey’s Son Leaves USC

The son of Los Angeles Dodgers great Steve Garvey has decided to leave the USC baseball team after just one semester on the college campus. Citing academic challenges, highly touted freshman outfielder Ryan Garvey has left the Trojans to enroll at Riverside Community College.

“I passed all my classes, I’m eligible, it was great, but I was studying from 9:30 to 6 every day and I was more worried about school than baseball, and my thing was to go there to play baseball,” the younger Garvey told the Desert Sun Newspaper. “I love ‘SC, it was one of my dream schools from the beginning, but my main goal is to be a professional baseball player and I felt I was more focused on school than sports.”

Garvey was selected in the 15th round of the 2011 MLB Draft by the Philadelphia Phillies. By going to a junior college for a semester he will immediately be eligible for the 2012 MLB Draft. Had he stayed at USC, he would have had to wait until the 2014 draft before he was eligible again.

Garvey hit nine home runs with 44 RBIs and 13 doubles as a senior in 2011. Perfect Game rated him as the 20th overall high school prospect in the state of California earlier this year.

Garvey’s father, Steve Garvey, was a 10-time MLB All-Star. He played in 1,207 consecutive games as one point in his career, which ranks fourth in MLB history. The elder Garvey also played college baseball at Michigan State.